22 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Toru Ishikawa, Nora S. Newcombe
Spatial thinking has unique characteristics that offer interesting research challenges. First, spatial thinking concerns space at different scales. Thinking about the structures of molecules, envisioning the folding and unfolding of a piece of paper, making a mechanical drawing, packing a suitcase, finding your way to…
David H. Uttal, Kiley McKee, Nina Simms, Mary Hegarty + 1 more
Spatial thinking skills are associated with performance, persistence, and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) school subjects. Because STEM knowledge and skills are integral to developing a well-trained workforce within and beyond STEM, spatial skills have become a major focus of…
Katie A. Gilligan-Lee, Zachary C. K. Hawes, Kelly S. Mix
It is well established that spatial thinking is central to discovery, learning, and communication in mathematics, as indicated by convincing evidence that those with strong spatial skills also demonstrate advantages for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) performance. Yet, spatial thinking-the…
Heather Burte, Aaron L. Gardony, Allyson Hutton, Holly A. Taylor
Spatial thinking skills positively relate to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outcomes, but spatial training is largely absent in elementary school. Elementary school is a time when children develop foundational cognitive skills that will support STEM learning throughout their education. Spatial…
Emily Grossnickle Peterson, Adam B. Weinberger, David H. Uttal, Bob Kolvoord + 1 more
'Bob Kolvoord' 'Adam E. Green'] Background Prior research has revealed positive effects of spatial activity participation (e.g., playing with blocks, sports) on current and future spatial skills. However, research has not examined the degree to which spatial activity participation remains stable over time, and little…
Jianzhen Zhang, Xiaoyu Liang, Ting Su, Xinyao Li + 3 more
'Zhenni An' 'Yanhua Xu'] Few studies have examined how family capital affects the sense of place, and the effect of spatial thinking on the relationship between the two is unclear. This study constructs a mediation model to examine the impact of family capital on sense of place and the mediation effect of geospatial…
Ilias Stogiannidis, Steven McDonagh, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools, excelling in tasks that integrate visual and textual comprehension, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, existing benchmarks for VLMs include spatial components, which often fail to isolate spatial…
Zhe Zhang, Yuhan Wu, Lianjie Jia, Yifan Wang + 8 more
Understanding and reasoning about the physical world requires spatial intelligence—the ability to interpret geometry, perspective, and spatial relations beyond 2D perception. While recent vision large models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding, they remain fundamentally 2D perceivers and struggle with genuine 3D…
Johannes Schöning, Brent Hecht, Martin Raubal, Antonio Krüger + 2 more
'Meredith Marsh' 'Michael Rohs'] Virtual globes have progressed from little-known technology to broadly popular software in a mere few years. We investigated this phenomenon through a survey and discovered that, while virtual globes are en vogue, their use is restricted to a small set of tasks so simple that they do…
Heather Burte, Aaron L. Gardony, Allyson Hutton, Holly A. Taylor
Considering how spatial thinking connects to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) outcomes, recent studies have evaluated how spatial interventions impact elementary students’ math learning. While promising, these interventions tend to overlook other factors affecting math learning; perceptions of…
Alan J. Cain
This paper studies how spatial thinking interacts with simplicity in [informal] proof, by analysing a set of example proofs mainly concerned with Ferrers diagrams (visual representations of partitions of integers, and comparing them to proofs that do not use spatial thinking. The analysis shows that using diagrams and…
Srinjita Bhaduri, Peter Gyory, Tamara Sumner
Often neglected in traditional education, spatial thinking has proved to play a critical role in achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Spatial thinking skills can be enhanced by training, life experience, and practice. One approach to train these skills is through 3D…
Margherita Malanchini, Kaili Rimfeld, Nicholas G. Shakeshaft, Andrew McMillan + 7 more
Performance in everyday spatial orientation tasks (e.g. map reading and navigation) has been considered functionally separate from performance on more abstract object-based spatial abilities (e.g. mental rotation and visualization). However, evidence remains scarce and unsystematic. With a novel gamified battery, we…
Zoe Falomir
This paper presents a Qualitative model for Reasoning about Object Rotations (QOR) which is applied to solve the Cube Comparison Test (CCT) by Ekstrom et al. (1976). A conceptual neighborhood graph relating the Rotation movement to the Location change and the Orientation change (CNGRLO) of the features on the cube…
James A. Gornet, Matt Thomson
Humans construct internal cognitive maps of their environment directly from sensory inputs without access to a system of explicit coordinates or distance measurements. While machine learning algorithms like SLAM utilize specialized inference procedures to identify visual features and construct spatial maps from visual…
Wang, Shuai, Zhang, Daoan + 8 more
Humans can perceive and understand 3D space and long videos from sequential visual observations. But do visionlanguage models (VLMs) can? Recent work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art VLMs still struggle to understand 3D space and long videos, although they are powerful in typical vision-language tasks. Current…
Xiaoliang Luo, Robert M. Mok, Bradley C. Love
Discoveries of functional cell types, exemplified by the cataloging of spatial cells in the hippocampal formation, are heralded as scientific breakthroughs. We question whether the identification of cell types based on human intuitions has scientific merit and suggest that “spatial cells” may arise in non-spatial…
Ian A. Clark, Victoria Hotchin, Anna Monk, Gloria Pizzamiglio + 2 more
Autobiographical memory, future thinking and spatial navigation are critical cognitive functions that are thought to be related, and are known to depend upon a brain structure called the hippocampus. Surprisingly, direct evidence for their interrelatedness is lacking, as is an understanding of why they might be…
Robert M. Mok, Bradley C. Love
One view is that conceptual knowledge is organized as a “cognitive map” in the brain, using the circuitry in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) that supports spatial navigation. In contrast, we find that a domain-general learning algorithm explains key findings in both spatial and conceptual domains. When the clustering…
Authors not listed
Real-world datasets in chemical engineering and bioengineering processes--such as those from catalytic reactors, multiphase flows, polymerization reactors, bioreactors, and clinical trials--can often be unlabelled or disorganized, rendering the training of existing supervised learning models ineffective at learning the…
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Previously we posited that a systematic and general description of stereoisomerism could be based upon the principles of the polytopal rearrangement model. The most daunting challenge to this end is to comprehensively describe all possible geometries for arbitrary n-coordinate centres, ABn, and for this we have…
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In philosophy and science, a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. Ancient Greek philosophy Aristotle defined the first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” First principles thinking (or reasoning from first…